Google I/O: Google Storage now open for all; adds new features

At last years Google I/O, a new service called Google Storage was announced. This was in direct competition with Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service) since it used similar access mechanisms and conventions.

Around a year later and now Google has made the service available for all without needing an invite. A number of new features and changes have been made to Google Storage as well.

Among the new features that have been introduced are:

A new free usage tier: Up to a certain quota Google Storage is free of cost to those wanting to try out the service. This trial plan is only valid till the end of this year. The free usage quotas are as follows:

5 GB of free storage,

25 GB of free data transfer into Google Storage,

25 GB of free data transfer out of Google Storage,

2,500 free PUT, POST and LIST requests, and

25,000 free GET, HEAD and other requests.

New storage region in Europe

A new API: To make more improvements, a new version 2 of the API has been released, although the old API is still available.

Support for larger data sizes: Now objects of up to 5TB can be uploaded

Team accounts support: A team of developers can use the same Google Storage account without needing to enable billing themselves.

Support for chunked transfer encoding: One can now stream data straight to their Google Storage account without knowing the data size in advance.

Simpler sharing: Data can now be shared with anyone having a Google account, rather than requiring that they have a Google Storage account as well.

Google is pushing its storage solution hard as a competitor to Amazon S3, however Amazon has not been constantly improving their service throughout the year as well, and is likely to fight back with new features of it's own.